Love Never Dies, review of reviews

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies is the sequel to his hit musical The
Phantom of the Opera.

Phantom is the most successful show ever, a production with earnings greater than Star Wars or Titanic, but the critical reaction to the follow-up on its London opening has been distinctly mixed.

The Telegraph’s Charles Spencer gives it four stars, calling it “Lloyd Webber’s finest show since the original Phantom, with a score blessed with superbly haunting melodies and a yearning romanticism that sent shivers racing down my spine.” He points out that, in an era when musical comedies like Hairspray and Legally Blonde reign supreme, a ‘gloomy-doomy’ show like this “seems like a relic of another age.”

Paul Taylor in The Independent goes even further, giving it five stars and acclaiming the “mix of the heart-stopping and the stomach-lurching (a true kinaesthetic experience)” which “characterises some of the best sequences”. He praises the show's “technical excellence” and the fact that “the leading couple sing beautifully together.”

The Times, by contrast, gives the show two stars, taking issue with what it calls a “dismally implausible plot” and a Phantom who has “taken an anger management course since landing in New York.” Benedict Nightingale feels that the show lacks “the menace, the horror, the psychological darkness” of its predecessor.

Michael Billington in The Guardian gives it three stars, finding “much to enjoy” but , like other reviewers finds the plot and lyrics unsatisfying, suggesting that the show’s problems “lie within the book” and that it “lacks… narrative tension”.

Quentin Letts in The Daily Mail also draws attention to disappointing book, what he describes as “the lack of solid story-telling”. His ambivalence shades into criticism when he compares the show to ‘Phantom’, calling it “too much an also-ran to the prequel, and its opening is too stodgy.”

Critics were not particularly taken with Phantom when it first opened either, but it has gone on to be performed in 149 cities, being seen by 100 million people in 14 languages.